Fourth Day of the Decameron

The Fourth Day of the Decameron marks a turn to unhappy love under the governance of Filostrato. Its stories place desire beside loss, danger, and public disgrace: the opening tale announces the deaths of Ghismonda and Guiscardo, while other episodes begin with secret attachments shadowed by foreboding or expose the humiliation behind a supposed religious marvel.

The Day’s Framework

The Fourth Day follows the close of the third. Filostrato rises with the company, and they go to a fair garden, where they spend the morning and dine in the place where they had supped the previous evening. After resting at midday, they gather by a fountain. Filostrato then calls on Fiammetta to begin the day’s storytelling, placing the first tale within the company’s familiar rhythm of garden, meal, rest, and shared narration.

Theme and Opening Tale

The day’s announced subject is lovers whose love has had an unhappy ending. Fiammetta’s first story gives that theme an unmistakably tragic opening: Tancred, Prince of Salerno, kills his daughter’s lover, Guiscardo, and sends her the lover’s heart in a golden bowl. Ghismonda pours poison over the heart and drinks it, dying in grief. The tale’s announced sequence makes love’s private bond collide with a father’s violence, and turns an object of mourning—the golden bowl and the heart it contains—into the image that governs the lovers’ final separation.

Other Registers of Unhappy Love

The day’s material also includes deception that ends in exposure rather than a lovers’ death. After impersonating the angel Gabriel, Fra Alberto is recognized when his mask is removed before a Venetian crowd. The people jeer at and pelt him; members of his religious community eventually free him and take him back to the convent, where he is believed to have died in prison. His public disgrace gives the day’s treatment of love a sharply satirical counterpart: desire and religious pretence lead not to fulfillment but to humiliation and punishment.

Another tale begins with Andrevuola, the daughter of Messer Negro da Ponte Carraro, and Gabriotto, a man of lower social standing but praised for his character and appearance. With a servant’s help, Andrevuola brings him into her father’s garden, and the two secretly become husband and wife. Their garden meetings, initially a space for private happiness, acquire an ominous counterpoint when Andrevuola dreams that a dark, indistinct force tears Gabriotto from her embrace and carries him underground. She wakes relieved that the dream was not real, but its threat shapes her response when Gabriotto asks to visit the next night. The movement from secret marriage to foreboding exemplifies the day’s governing subject: love is presented not as secure possession, but as a bond exposed to forces that may abruptly end it.